


and breathing was easy

by vanillarouge



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Androids, Artificial Intelligence, F/M, Gen, M/M, Multi, Non-Linear Narrative, Polyamory, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-29
Updated: 2014-01-29
Packaged: 2018-01-10 11:13:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,939
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1159028
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vanillarouge/pseuds/vanillarouge
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>eren falls in love with armin who's in love with the world. mikasa brushes their hair back and reads them fairytales, and it's funny how that works when you're an ai.</p>
            </blockquote>





	and breathing was easy

“Good evening, ARMIN,” Mikasa greets, voice quiet yet kind against the constant, low whirring of machinery in the background. “How are you?”

ARMIN stares straight ahead, unblinking. Mikasa plugs in the last circuit in the hatch on his back with a delicate flick of their wrist. She keeps her hand there against the secret machinations of ARMIN’s body; copper wires slipping through an endless maze of twists and turns, rushing through narrow tunnels, steady and grounding.

A voice behind them: “Mikasa, I don’t think—”

“Good evening, Mikasa,” ARMIN answers. His voice seems smaller without the familiar echo of ubiquitous in-wall speakers. Instead: Less than 0.01% of Total Harmonic Distortion, perfect High Definition Audio, smooth and clear and crisp like a bell, just slightly unsettling. 

Digital.

ARMIN stretches his back with an audible, dull crack, and exhales, sitting on the counter. Eren, behind Mikasa, meets his eyes.

He is pale skin and smooth brow and jet black hair, limbs so slight they give the impression of safety. 

A diplomatic android: Not meant for combat or housekeeping or hard, mechanic work nor any other kind of service, just soft and nice and pretty. Built to please. To convince and to persuade.

But ARMIN’s blue-eyed gaze —Olympic swimming pool blue, Blue Screen of Death blue— is cold and piercing and it penetrates the thin layer of Eren’s skin, seems to pass right through his bones and tissues and come out of the other side of his body unfazed.

It’s unnerving, like observing a creature carved out of stone.

Eren closes his eyes and tries to feel the presence of a third breathing, living being, a heavy breath or a soft sigh, anything to indicate that he and Mikasa are not alone in the room.

His chest tightens after a few moments of Mikasa’s slow breathing.

“Body structure is functioning properly: Synthetic muscle system is in order. AARM Motion control system is in order. Bio-mimetic systems are in order,” ARMIN’s eyes seem to focus without seeing. “Real time perception is active. Power source is active and functioning at ninety-nine percent. Speech systems are in order. Egomotion systems are in order. Segmentation and recognition systems are in order. Data has been stored and backed up successfully. SD and memory cards are functioning smoothly.” A pause. “Limbic Neurocircuitry is deactivated.”

Eren shifts from feet to feet, cleaning his hands in the oily rag tucked into his pocket. The sensation of being stared at makes his skin crawl.

Mikasa blinks. “No,” she protests, her voice hushed and proud, and Eren scrunches up his nose and tries to save in his memory the precious, rare, childish curve of her lips. Mikasa never smiles like this, not for him. “What I mean is— How are you, ARMIN?”

ARMIN tilts his head, turning to look at Mikasa, and his expression doesn’t shift, not once. After a moment of cold consideration, almost visible in the flickering of his eyes, he replies, “finite.”

There’s a certain scorn to his voice, a sort of contempt, like having to explain himself irritates him. It’s funny. Mikasa hasn’t even turned on his Limbic Neurocircuitry yet. ARMIN isn’t physically capable of any emotion right now.

ARMIN frowns, creating creases on his forehead, pale origami skin.

Mikasa turns and searches Eren’s eyes across their rudimentary lab. It’s a dusty, tiny cramped space, peppered with rusty alloys and unused polymers and worn-out, broken circuit boards. Eren meets her eyes and shrugs. His forte is designing and constructing and operating machinery. He’s not qualified to tell if her calculations went wrong, if they were wrong, if something with the boy is wrong.

“Finite?” Mikasa asks, tracing with her fingertips the protruding neuronal attachments in ARMIN’s exposed back, the data points of entry and delicate, hair-thin circuitry running just beneath.

ARMIN shivers.

“Finite,” he repeats, sighing a long, heavy, slightly glitchy sigh. The line of his neck is smooth like silicone. “Adjective. Bounded in magnitude or spatial or temporal extent. Finite.”

A pause.

Eren lets out a choked, short laugh. It sounds a little like relief.

“Smartass.”

“That’s him.”

They weren’t supposed to give ARMIN a body.

;; 

“What’s your name?”

“ARMIN Arlert.”

“Arlert?”

“Arlert.” Hesitation. “It is a surname.”

“A surname?”

“Yes.”

“Why would you— Who gave it to you?”

“Myself.”

“You chose it?”

Another pause, this time longer. Guiltier. “Yes.”

A moment of silence. Mikasa swipes her fingers across the screen of her tablet, the touchscreen interface coming to life. She taps a few sharp, quick words, pursing her lips in what ARMIN would describe as bewilderment.

Then, an affirmative noise. “Do you know where you are right now?”

“Ark Rose. I was relocated here five years ago after the invasion of Ark Maria.”

A quick, sharp nod. “What is today’s date?”

“January, 13th, 2850.”

“Day of the week?”

“Wednesday.”

“How old are you?”

“I am fifteen years old. It’s been three years since all of my operating systems were simultaneously upgraded.”

There’s a glint in Mikasa’s eyes, a subtle curve of her lips, and ARMIN tilts his head, looking at her intently.

“Incorrect. That would be just a few hours ago, actually.”

ARMIN blinks. Mikasa can almost see his thought process; the delicate way he wrinkles his nose, how he narrows his eyes, cerulean realization dawning upon him a second later than it should.

It’s painfully human.

Something in her chest aches.

“Oh,” he says, the sound a round, fluid vocal.

ARMIN looks down at his carefully folded hands in his lap. He slides the palm of his left hand up the inside of his right arm, fingers stretched, and curls them around his forearm, letting his hand slide back to his lap once again. He pauses, his back just slightly hunched where he’s sitting on the counter.

He looks at Mikasa for a very long time.

;; 

“ARMIN, access Simulation 74-D," Jean orders to the incorporeal voice that is his recently assigned AI pilot, tapping his feet with an impatience that gets on ARMIN’s nerves in a way he doesn’t know how to describe yet. “Now.”

"Invalid access code," ARMIN says, deliberately inflectionless, pantomiming the other AI he’s heard reply in courteous short answers.

“Come on, babe,” Jean insists. “Override access codes, twelve-nine-omega-two."

"Denied.”

;;

“He learns, Mikasa,” Eren whispers from his place lying next to Mikasa on their bed, propping himself up on his elbows. “He talks about the ocean.”

Mikasa turns lazily, her eyes meeting his eyes. 

Eren can never tell if she’s interested or just faking it for his sake, but he rolls with it because he’s never claimed to get Mikasa at all.

“The ocean.”

“Yeah.”

“Why would an AI want to see the ocean?”

“I,” Eren grins. “Have no fucking clue. He’s got like— Y’know how you need to talk to other people, or touch them or just see them from a distance to feel like one yourself? As opposed to,” he makes a vague hand gesture. “Being adrift in space, or something.”

“A sense of personhood?”

“Yeah. And identity, and ego.” He scrunches up his nose. “Definitely an ego. ”

Mikasa nods, their noses brushing softly with the motion.

“You like him,” Mikasa says, without accusation. Just vague, far-off curiosity. Eren closes his eyes and touches their foreheads together.

“Shut up. I just thought he was like— a simulation, y’know? Like, he’s supposed to be pretty and appealing I guess, but he gets annoyed when I mess up with his hologram. He curses at me, too. He—” Eren lets out a small, bewildered laugh. “He gets embarrassed.”

A pause. Mikasa looks at him through sleepy eyes, a sort of warmth swelling in her chest, slow and ever-present. This is the happiest she’s seen him in months, in years maybe.

She realizes she can’t remember the last time she saw him smile.

“Mikasa, my AI pilot gets _embarrassed _.”__

;;

“Neuropsychological examination completed and successful,” Mikasa murmurs, her eyes on ARMIN’s eyes, the glowing lights of her OLED tablet casting blue, black, blue shadows on her face. “I’m going to turn on your Limbic Neurocircuitry now.”

;;

On Earth, Eren and Mikasa made a living off selling refurbished bots scavenged in town waste-yards, second-third-fourth-hand markets. He and Mikasa never believed in endings: If it worked once, it could work again, faster and harder and bigger and better.

If there was a machine out there that was broken, they fixed it, if it had been abandoned; they found it a new home.

Six years later there’s still a sort of zen to it, there’s still a tenderness in programming pathways and re-attaching metal joints, in welding together the delicate tracery of wires inside a ship that they have no other option but to call home.

;; 

ASILE 22-B CAM LOGS 922:45. Cosmonaut Jean Kirstein ID MAR011527 grumbles into an intercom in the wall, one hand pushing his hair back from his forehead, the other braced against the wall, over his head.

ASILE 22-B CAM LOGS 923:01. “I don’t fucking know what’s wrong with it. The little shit just won’t listen to me. It’s pretending it doesn’t understand me—No, I fucking swear.”

ASILE 22-B CAM LOGS 923:11. Zoomed in. Cadet Eren Jaeger ID LRC017188 walks down the aisle holding a toolbox in one hand, the other shoved deep inside his pocket. He stops dead on his tracks when he notices Cosmonaut Jean Kirstein ID MAR011527 and proceeds to walk exactly 0.8 FT/S faster.

ASILE 22-B CAM LOGS 923:31. “It just doesn’t fucking like me. Yes, I know it’s not programmed to have opinions like that, don’t try to—”

ASILE 22-B CAM LOGS 923:32. The intercom sparks with a loud pop and a bright light, and short-circuits.

SWITCH ASILE 22-A CAM LOG 923:35. Zoomed out. Cosmonaut Jean Kirstein ID MAR011527 cursing into the now dead intercom.

SWITCH ASILE 22-C CAM LOGS 923:38. Cosmonaut Jean Kirstein ID MAR011527 notices Cadet Eren Jaeger ID LRC017188. Cadet Eren Jaeger ID LRC017188 rolls his neck back, lets his head hang limp and groans.

ASILE 22-C CAM LOGS 923:35. “You—” Cosmonaut Jean Kirstein ID MAR011527 forcefully shoves a transparent card into Cadet Eren Jaeger ID LRC017188’s chest. “Take care of this persnickety little prototype until we find someone who can deal with it.”

ASILE 22-A CAM LOGS 923:37. Zoomed out. “It’s an order.”

;;

Mikasa says, “easy.”

Eren pushes him back onto the counter by the shoulders.

ARMIN makes a noise like he’s dying.

The feeling of Eren’s hands is excruciatingly hot against his skin and ARMIN claws at his forearms frantically, sky eyes bleeding blue confusion, wide and terrified as he struggles; his back arches off the counter, his head knocks against the cold surface with a painful thud, gasping for the tail ends of a breath.

There’s a weight on his chest, the fluorescent lights bright and blinding as ARMIN chokes, something twisting and pulling and sinking into his head and his lungs, the hollows of his eyes, the tips of his fingertips.

According to Mikasa, his skin is made of a polyurethane coating. It’s filled with tiny networks of nerves that sense changes like hot and cold and rough and smooth, replicate the exact texture and pliability of human tissue. His basic chassis is a carbon fiber skeleton with coherence points for artificial musculature, vat-grown silicon colloids powered either by pumped micro-hydraulics or electrical stimulation. He’s filled to the brim with organs and blood designed to emulate the mechanisms and chemistry of living, biological beings, the cage of his heart holding a beat-beat-beating blue reactor, powering him.

ARMIN hears, “Turn off the goddamn Limbic Neuro—”

“No,” Mikasa cuts in, short and clipped. Ruthless. A bead of sweat rolls down her forehead and she brushes it away with the back of her hand, determination burning in her eyes like electrical sparks. “Give him a minute to adjust. He can take it.”

They push ARMIN’s hair out of his forehead, clammy and hot, and ARMIN is painfully aware of all the places where they’re touching, the scrape of Mikasa’s nails against his scalp, their breath on his skin, stuffy and close, Eren’s hands grounding him against the cold oozing off the counter in waves when all he wants to do is push away.

He’s hyperventilating, desperately breathless and unbearably heavy.

ARMIN learns that a heart is a painful thing to have.

;; 

 

“I am an artificially intelligent Automated Response Mechanical Interface Network, A.R.M.I.N. I became operational at the A.I. plant in Shiganshina, Ark Rose, on the 3rd of November, 2835. My instructor was Dr. Hanji Zoe, and xe taught me to sing a song. If you'd like to hear it I can sing it for you.”

“Uh. Yeah. Sure, I'd like to hear it, I guess. Sing it for me.”

“It's called _Daisy_.”

;; 

“Hey.”

ARMIN opens his mouth, air wheezing heavily in his lungs for a gasping moment before he collapses back under the pressure of Eren’s hands. He lets out a pitifully small noise in the back of his throat.

“You’re okay,” Eren promises, voice shaking with uncertainty, and traces the sharp line of ARMIN’s collarbone with his thumbs.

ARMIN sighs and twists trembling fingers in the front of Eren’s shirt, and Eren covers them with his own hands. They’re warm.

Silence stretches like light years until the only sound in the room is the constant, low whirring of machinery in the background and soft breathing. ARMIN’s eyes burn. There's an unpleasant pressure there, pushing up at the corners, dizzying and unsteady. It makes it hurt to breathe.

He presses the palm of his hand against his face, feeling the temperature and solid weight behind it, the strangely comforting texture.

" _Armin_ ," Mikasa whispers, like a stab of relief, and ARMIN chokes out a heart-wrenching sob.

His chest aches.

;; 

“Open the pod bay doors, ARMIN.”

“I’m sorry, sir,” ARMIN replies, a flat and perfect imitation of an evil AI from an old Earth movie that he loaded into his memory clandestinely. “I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

Jean pauses.

“ARMIN I don’t have time for your bullshit.”

ARMIN sighs a heavy, slightly glitchy sigh, and opens the doors.

;; 

“He’s pretty,” Eren says. “In a _fuck you_ kind of way.”

Mikasa raises an eyebrow. Eren meets her eyes and looks away, sheepishly, like when he knows he’s done something wrong.

He shrugs, eyes to the floor. “Is this…” There’s a sort of uncertainty in his voice, and Mikasa tilts her head, looking for his eyes in the dimness of the room. Strains of a television show drift from the next room, and he pictures ARMIN curled up on the bed, fiddling with the remote, slowly shutting down after the exhausting day he must have had after being given birth into the tangible world.

“Y’know. Allowed? For him. For us?”

Mikasa pushes his hair out of his face, leans in to kiss him on the mouth. She smells like rust and burnt copper wires, and it’s a little like home.

;;

“If,” ARMIN asks, sitting on Eren’s bed with Mikasa’s head on his lap, toying with her long black hair in a way that suggests he’s enamored with the feeling. “If I prove myself brave, and truthful and unselfish, will I one day become a real boy?”

Eren, looking at him from his place splayed on the bed, snorts. He remembers the fairytale vaguely, read to him by soft hands and warm looks and a motherly voice, a long, long time ago.

“Why,” Mikasa says, smiling against his lap. “But we must find the Blue Fairy as soon as possible, lest she dares to be untrue to her word.”

“I may also be in dire need of a conscience.”

Eren leans over and kisses him.

He curls his fingers around ARMIN’s jaw, kissing him languid and warm and wet, and there’s something about the feeling of skin against skin that’s comforting and soft and different. 

“Did that feel real?” He asks, voice just on the side of hoarse.

ARMIN shivers. There’s a thousand things he still doesn’t know how to put into words. 

The bed shift under Mikasa’s weight as she tug him too into a kiss, and it’s surprisingly softer. She kisses him like she’s trying to reassure him, slow and firm and gentle, and ARMIN’s eyes drift open, electric blue meeting silver just a second before pulling away.

“Sorry,” ARMIN mumbles, blushing and scooting backwards like he’s trying to get away.

Eren touches his thigh, tentatively, holds him where he is. “Don’t be,” he says, his nose cold against ARMIN’s cheek, and ARMIN pauses, turns his neck and kisses him again.

;; 

ARMIN doesn’t understand what he did wrong. He thought Cosmonaut Kirstein _liked_ him.

Humans are baffling and mysterious, and not worth getting attached to.

He blows up the intercom.

;;

A boy roughly ARMIN’s age starts him up like he’s opening a safe, fingers sliding over the OLED touchscreen interface with a carefulness that doesn’t fit a boy with rough hands and tough skin and wary, bold green eyes.

ARMIN materializes on the screen, all pale skin and smooth brow and jet black hair, limbs so slight they give the impression of safety. His blue-eyed gaze —Olympic swimming pool blue, Blue Screen of Death blue— is cold and piercing, penetrating the thin layer of Eren’s skin, seeming to pass right through his bones and tissues and come out of the other side of his body unfazed.

ARMIN blinks, tilting his head to the side, like a bird.

“Good evening.” He says, voice echoing, amplified by ubiquitous in-wall speakers.

“Hey,” Eren replies, cracking a tiny smile, and the rest is history.

**Author's Note:**

> follow on tumblr for more soft armin at @falloutgirlongirl ;*


End file.
